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Mark Long wears a lot of different hats. Before he became CEO of Meteor Entertainment he was the founder of game developer Zombie Studios and a New York Times bestselling graphic novel author for The Silence of Our Friends.

Now he’s taking his expertise in game development, writing and technology (he also pioneered early virtual reality technology at David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton) and applying them to transmedia. Long’s Meteor Entertainment, which has published the free-to-play Mech shooter HAWKEN, has partnered with Archaia Entertainment to digitally deliver his new graphic novel, RUBICON, over the cloud platform created for the HAWKEN game and transmedia entertainment.

The graphic novel, which offers a modern take on Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai by setting the action during the Afghanistan War and focusing on Navy SEAL operators, will also be available in a hardcover version. Long developed the story from an idea by Oscar-winning writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and a story by SEAL Team VI and Red Cell veteran, Dan Capel.

Gamers who purchase the graphic novel at playhawken.com/#universe will receive an additional $10 in Meteor Credits to use for micro-transactions in the HAWKEN game. There will also be a RUBICON movie and video game in the future to further develop the RUBICON franchise. Long talks about what role technology will play for Meteor as it continues to develop new transmedia entertainment for the cloud in this exclusive interview.

Can you explain how your cloud system server technology works?

When we founded Meteor to publish HAWKEN, we had two simple, but hugely ambitious goals. The first was to be an uncompromising publisher of free-to-play (F2P) games and their transmedia. An art house publisher, if you will. The second was to distribute globally, direct to consumer on the open web. Which is, as I said, is simple but crazy ambitious. Even the most successful F2P publishers like Riot and Wargaming.net don't distribute globally, but instead either rely on partners for some foreign territories or are still in the process of launching in those territories years after going live.

We went global with HAWKEN on the first day of our Beta. And what made that possible is the resizable compute capacity cloud we've built. Our cloud reduces the time to obtain and boot new game server instances to minutes, allowing us to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as concurrent player numbers change. And that changes the economics of game servers by allowing us to pay only for capacity that we actually use.

What have you learned from what we've seen companies like Netflix and Kindle as they utilize the cloud?

Meteor's Cloud is powered by the same Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) technology that powers Netflix, Kindle and Instagram. It's a virtual computing environment, with web service interfaces to data centers spread all over the world. Instagram turned to EC2 early on to deal with its rapid growth. And even though the company now has more than 100 million users, it has just three people maintaining its cloud!

How have you designed this technology for games like HAWKEN?

We decided early on not to duplicate the work of others but instead build on it. For a startup like Meteor, that means not building storage, compute systems, or user interface components. So for example, rather than accessing data from networked hard drives, Meteor's server instances use solid-state disks. An FPS like HAWKEN is all about speed and responsiveness and SSDs are much faster.

How have you tweaked this technology through the HAWKEN closed and open beta?

We started closed Beta with just one data center in Oregon. We now have eight clusters worldwide, which allowed us to go global day one of open Beta. I get an analytics report by email every morning, and my favorite part is this color coded map of the world showing where our players are. White means no players and there are only two countries that color - North Korea and Uganda. We literally have players all over the world. Even in Mongolia and Antarctica. To be this scrappy indie game startup with a global player base - it's crazy cool!

How many people can play concurrently on one of these servers running at a high shooter frame rate?

I know this sounds like hubris, but the number is infinite. Auto scaling allows us to scale capacity up or down automatically. We increase game servers when demand spikes, and decrease automatically when demand lulls to minimize costs. We actually follow the sun around the world scaling up as players come online and back down as they log off.

What opportunities does this cloud open up for transmedia like the Rubicon graphic novel and the HAWKEN graphic novel?

The game industry is going through the same digital disruption that music, television and books are going through. Platforms are opening up to multiple media types. More people watch Netflix now on their Xbox 360 than play games. Platforming is going bye-bye as we have come to expect we can have what we want, wherever we want. And since we're powered by the same cloud technology enabling this disruption, we can take advantage of it to distribute our transmedia extensions to HAWKEN.

How do you see the HAWKEN video series taking advantage of this technology when it's ready to launch?